Is it too late now, is there time to read in the university? I asked the questions years ago. They were rhetorical and intended to inflame. I knew that the university was in ruins. Still, I had no intention of stopping shovelling and sifting. It was not that I was looking for something in particular. Like Noddy Boffin in my first epigraph above, I wanted some reading, some fine bold reading. But what I loved was not books exactly, it was the dust itself. It was so fine! The thought of ruin encouraged me. I had read (when I dropped into poetry, burningly all at once, a hunger seizing my heart) that my heart is a handful of dust. That I am soft sift in an hourglass. And that this heart, the ‘my heart’ was in the poem and in me, like a letter folded and slipped into a heart, as one slips an imaginary letter into an imaginary breast-pocket, now lost inside, but a letter still, perhaps readable under certain conditions not entirely known to me, certainly not under the jurisdiction of an ‘I’: no longer property nor simply private. The alphabed was deep in my body, the Grandma who sat waiting in it was indeed out of a book.

From long before I had to earn my living or bought a single splendid volume, I lived on, and lived beside, all sorts of phrases and figures from poems and stories.